I am a self-taught web developer, entrepreneur, and mentor. Being curious is the basis of my journey so far.
While studying for a master’s degree in Central European History, small personal programming projects challenged me. I built a multilingual dictionary for three Slavic languages, German, and English, and automated my account in a multiplayer online game to push me into the top 10.
After my studies, I used an entrepreneurial scholarship to build a semi-automatic translation tool to help occasional translators find the right word. Although it failed economically, it paved the way for me to become an entrepreneur.
For a while, I built online shops and platforms for clients, often leveraging the marketing and SEO knowledge I gained from my side projects. Many of these projects are still leading in their field today.
In 2009, I drew lousy letters in Scrabble, which led me to develop the first Scrabble word search for German. A few years later, this turned into a publishing business. Before selling the project nine years later, my team and I reached millions of users and more than 40 MM page impressions per month.
Part of my platform’s financial success was a WordPress plugin I engineered to deliver display ads on our websites. It was the first to tailor ads to responsive devices and offered various options for split-testing ad content and positions.
In 2014, I published this in-house project under the name Advanced Ads. It quickly grew into its own business, supporting a team of up to twelve. I sold it in early 2023 and stayed on board as a consultant. Starting in August 2024, I am the Operations Manager, coordinating non-dev work.
Since 2012, I have been managing projects through my company webgilde1. Among the active ones are my image caption plugin, Image Source Control, and a travel site about Slovakia (in German).
So far, my career reads like a success story, but I have had more failures than wins. I am still curious.
- The German word “Gilde” is “guild” in English. I originally wanted to gather a team of talented people to work on various projects. ↩︎